If any individual deserves credit above all others for raising public awareness about the dangers of fossil fuel reliance, it might be Dr. James Hansen, who has been studying the issue intensely since the mid-seventies. He became the first scientist to testify about global warming in front of Congress 25 summers ago. And if there’s anyone who has taken bold steps in response to such warnings, it is the writer/activist Bill McKibben, who has helped organize a global network to rally support for addressing the problem.

Both men have the arrest records to prove their dedication to the climate fight, so PLANET was interested in gaining their personal reactions to the summer that has so far seen boldface climate-related developments on a number of fronts. The season began with the first measurement of atmospheric carbon dioxide in excess of 400 parts per million, as recorded by NOAA researchers stationed in Hawaii. It also brought perhaps the most concrete plan of action yet by a sitting U.S. president to address the issue. Whether you’ve spent this summer of 400 ppm in the tornado-afflicted Great Plains, the fire-ravaged West, the rain-soaked Southeast, or under the oppressive heat dome that has covered much of the rest of the country, the news is bound to resonate.(more…)

Between 1962, just a few years after he left school, and 1992, when he died, architect Horace Gifford built forty modern houses on Fire Island, the sandy sliver of land that buffers Long Island from the Atlantic Ocean. A new book by Christopher Bascom Rawlins, Fire Island Modernist: Horace Gifford and the Architecture of Seduction, recognizes his legacy.

Fire Island, a 31-mile long stretch of ungroomed white beaches and wild grasses that, at its widest points, is not even three miles wide, is a fragile landscape, vulnerable to storms and erosion, with minimal infrastructure. Most areas are connected with boardwalks and have no roads, and are reached from the mainland most easily by ferry. This unique geography fosters tight, intimate communities, and over the decades the island has been a vibrant haven for artists and for gay men and women. In the summer its population swells with day-trippers and revelers.

Gifford’s houses, modestly scaled and terrifically stylish, suit both the place and the people. They’re constructed from the same mundane materials that suburban wood frame houses are, but rendered in sophisticated modern forms.

“Photography invaded my life,” Sebastião Salgado says during a TED speech on Genesis. An activist and former economist, Salgado’s demeanor is telling of the forty years he’s dedicated to capturing and witnessing the world’s most devastating tragedies. In 1994, Salgado was in Rwanda, documenting the genocide of the Tutsi, which would later be published in Migrations (2000). It was this that led Salgado to crave a project where his focus was not the tragedy of humanity, but instead, the beauty of this planet. The result is Genesis, his most recent and, he says, final project as a photographer.

Published by Taschen, Genesis is the result of approximately thirty trips on foot, light aircraft, boats, canoes, and hot air balloons over almost a decade. Some may view Genesis as a tangent to Salgado’s previous work, however, Salgado states that his mission has not varied and is instead simply approaching the same message from the opposite end.

It is a remarkably positive statement for a photographer who has spent his life following devastation. Biblical landscapes and portraits of those unadulterated by modern society span a mammoth 520 pages, voicing the beauty that still exists on our planet. According to Salgado, “Forty-six percent of the planet is still as it was in the time of genesis”.(more…)

PLANET previously introduced Bus Travelers by Richard Renaldi, a series of work that encapsulates Renaldi’s fascination with people and their idiosyncrasies. Taking this fascination further, Renaldi has been working on a project since 2007 that explores what would happen if two complete strangers were asked to physically interact with each other for a portrait. Taking the subjects out of their comfort zone, the strangers would stand intimately, while Renaldi disappeared behind an 8 x 10 large format camera. Thus began, Touching Strangers, Renaldi’s newest body of work.

Photography is often seen as a one man show but in Renaldi’s case, this is hardly true. The series is yet to be finished however, and relies on backers like yourself to publish the book via the Aperture Foundation. From now till August 5th, 2013, Touching Strangers can be pre-ordered on Kickstarter, which is scheduled to be released spring of 2014.

Those who support the campaign, will receive a special Kickstarter edition of the book, bound in cloth with special design and production features separate from those that will be distributed in stores. Signed and edition prints of his work are also available.

In the same way that we need a vacation to rest after a vacation, we might need a home where we can chill out after spending time at home. Even modest houses and apartments today are so richly furnished and plugged-in that we can barely rest when we’re inside: we’re streaming TV shows and music, working remotely, and connecting electronically with loved ones around the world. Home can be as demanding and draining as the workplace.

Perhaps the answer really is another home, a small shed in a quiet, out-of-the-way place, where we can retreat from both professional and personal demands. There are some spectacular options inside the book Rock the Shack: The Architecture of Cabins, Cocoons and Hide-Outs. These refuges are, for the most part, small, freestanding structures on rural sites, most of them located so remotely that there are few other structures, or even roads or walkways, in sight. But unlike typical country homes these places aren’t programmed for leisure: they don’t have great rooms, tennis courts, patios and pools. Instead they offer spare interior spaces for living, windows to stare out of, and immersion in a powerful landscape.

The most dramatic homes have been designed to support one single activity. Some are studios for painting or writing, some are playhouses, and some aren’t much more than elaborate sleeping chambers.

Like memories suddenly resurfacing, Italian photographer Roberta Ridolfi shares rediscovered images from a trip to Andalusia last September. “It’s amazing how editing can change the meaning of an edit,” she says. The edit indeed has a lighter mood compared to the original. Ridolfi finds inspiration from classic cinema, as if foretelling of her chosen title for the original series, Texas Hollywood. As if to emphasize this natural psyche, the way she describes how she became a photographer, is like reading the opening of a story: “My uncle had an old Nikon he bought in the 70’s he hardly ever used. For some reason he thought I could do something with it. Next thing I knew, I quit university and enrolled myself in a photography course. One thing led to another.”

Roberta currently lives and works in London as a fashion photographer.

A warming climate isn’t the only source of heat these days. There is, in fact, another source of burning intensity. Organized groups of protesters amped up the temperature in their own fashion by taking to the nation’s capitol in a recent display of opposition to the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. As clarion calls to address climate change spread, it’s worth remembering that demonstrations and fights of resistance have stoked the environmental movement since its inception. These measures have succeeded in numerous cases throughout the years to protect communities from exposure to hazardous waste and to save endangered species or threatened ecosystems.

The ferocious fire that inspired the name of Mark Kitchell’s new documentary isn’t the sooty, pollution-fueling combustion of coal or the burning of rainforests. A Fierce Green Fire, now in limited release, is named rather for the life-sustaining inner flame that the conservationist Aldo Leopold once observed in the eyes of a dying wolf and for the corresponding zeal that has fueled the efforts of environmentalists for nearly five decades. The very same passion that was on display last month in Washington has fed the movement for generations through often bitter fights and against long odds.

In the time since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published and the Sierra Club was victorious in blocking the construction of dams in the Grand Canyon, activists have been busy responding to an evolving set of practices that threaten our land, wildlife, water, and air.

Imagine a power plant in the middle of a wildlife sanctuary. Try to picture an energy source as a work of art. That’s exactly what the Land Art Generator Initiative asked designers and architects to do. For its second site-specific design competition the non-profit organization (LAGI for short), sought to inspire plans for land art installations with the duel function of being both ornamental attractions for visitors and sources of renewable energy. This time the initiative found a kindred spirit in a parks department that has asked citizens to envision a dumping ground as a place of natural beauty.

When LAGI’s directors were considering places on which to focus their 2012 contest, New York City’s Freshkills Park seemed like the ideal choice. The location’s transformation from what was once the world’s largest landfill to a 2,200-acre preserve is now being undertaken in stages over a 30-year development phase with a similar intent as the one informing LAGI’s own mission — questioning assumptions and repairing environmental damage with smart sustainable methods. And when it comes to alternative energy, the park has already begun harvesting methane from decomposing garbage to heat area homes.

In LAGI’s ultimate goal of one day witnessing the construction of “the world’s first work of public art, slash sustainable utility-scale power plant,” environmental stewardship goes hand in hand with the establishment of a public gathering place, just as it does in the ongoing overhaul of Freshkills.(more…)

The question What should we have for dinner? has never been so difficult to answer. A new exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History presents a survey of the diversity in tastes, growing techniques, and methods of cooking that have satisfied appetites across cultures and centuries. It’s hard to consider this broad range of agricultural and culinary trends past and present and not come to the conclusion that ours is one of the more transformational periods in the history of food. Genetic modifications to crops, which were the subject of the recently defeated Proposition 37 ballot measure in California, represent only one way in which our foods are changing. More broadly, our entire approach to eating is being modified.

That monumental shift is due largely to a growing consciousness of the connections drawn between food and health being made in the context of strained food supplies in a changing climate. The health and wellness proponent Dr. Andrew Weil recently published a cookbook called True Food in which he argues that meals made from sustainable and wholesome ingredients can be both flavorful and easy. Dr. Weil spoke to PLANET about the common sense principles that he and his partners Sam Fox and Michael Stebner have followed in building a small empire of health food restaurants and the larger currents that have informed his thoughts about food in a world waking up to a new era of eating.(more…)

If we stop to remember Oscar Niemeyer, the great Brazilian architect who died this week at the age of 104, it should be less to mourn his passing than to admire a life richly lived. Niemeyer accomplished what few architects can. Over a career that spanned eighty years he designed hundreds of buildings whose forms helped forge his country’s contemporary identity. He built Brazilian style.

Niemeyer was in the right place at the right time and possessed just the right attitude. His country’s immense, rolling landscape and tropical climate offered the perfect setting for an abstract, sculptural architecture. He came of age as an architect in the 1950’s, at a time when Brazil was becoming more unified politically and undertaking enormous building and infrastructure projects. And he was a unrepentant sensualist, an aesthete and ladies man whose passions drove him to pursue enormous commissions like the capitol buildings in Brasilia, and to celebrate beauty above all else. All of these identities were merged in his work, an architecture of immense reinforced concrete shells and planes, at once archly elegant and dazzlingly sensual.

His style has been called “tropical modernism” to distinguish it from the works of European contemporaries, who used a similar vocabulary of slender columns, open plans, and ribbon windows, but who fixed its rules and meanings philosophically.